It’s the depths of winter and I’m squatting in the snow, surrounded by southern beech forest, using a pair of tweezers to pick up fresh steaming deer poo.
My wife Maria, and palaeoecologist Jamie Wood, from Landcare Research, are doubled over in laughter, having just given me the official job title of pooper scooper.
We’re helping Jamie collect deer poo as part of a project investigating whether introduced deer fill the same job vacancy as the extinct moa in what remains of our unique ecosystems – an ecological surrogate to re-wild New Zealand.
This long-running and often vitriolic debate has become closely associated with the anti-1080 movement. Hunters have illegally re-introduced deer into national parks and other protected conservation areas, sometimes where they had previously been eradicated. An uproar ensues whenever a potential deer cull is floated by DOC.
So how did this feathers to fur debate start and can the latest Time Lord science help shed some light on it? Continue reading “Are deer the new moa: Ecosystem re-wilding or a flight of fancy?”